Nonsensical and sometimes not-so-nonsensical rants about what may or may not be going through my head. Try to liberalize your canvas of interpretation when reading these posts - you will go far...

Friday, June 29, 2012

Obscure sorrows

And I’m back to the blogosphere after a three month hiatus!
Honestly, I am bewildered at the number of people who continue to read and
follow my blog, despite the frequent sabbaticals and sheer inconsistency of
posting anything half decent here. A big
shout out and genuine thank you to everyone in Russia, United States, Saudi
Arabia and Latvia (I don’t even know where that is on the map) who read, follow
and re-blog my posts.

I stumbled upon something interesting lately- the dictionary
of obscure sorrows. Ever experience the moment when you are overcome with a
flurry of feelings and a contrariety of emotions but somehow, can’t put your
finger on them? Or at a loss of words as to how to articulate a particular
emotion? The dictionary of obscure sorrows is the solution to your problem. My
personal favourite and the one most pertinent to me is:

‘Kairosclerosis
- n. the moment you realize that
you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts
your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it
will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.’

I tend to do this every so often. For the longest time, I
have maintained there is something sad about happiness. It’s like a breath of
air – you can’t hold it in your mouth for too long. Try as you will, it will
eventually escape, leaving behind a void that craves to be filled. The moment I
realize I am happy, I try to give context to it, try to savor the feeling, try
to cling as long as I possibly can to the cliff hanger we like to call ‘happiness’.
But how does one even give context to happiness? How does one explain what it
feels like to be ‘happy’? Trying to capture or describe that feeling is like
trying to describe what water tastes like – It is an impossible task. And all
my efforts to let happy times linger are in vain once the law of averages kick
in and a happy spell is followed by a terrible lull.

As follows are other words that are relevant to me (In descending
order of importance):

Astrophe
- n. a hypothetical conversation
that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a
cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback—which serves as a kind of
psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people
than in the small ball of everyday life, which is a frustratingly cautious game
of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.

Anchorage
- n. the desire to hold on to time as
it passes, like trying to keep your grip on a rock in the middle of a river,
feeling the weight of the current against your chest while your elders float on
downstream, calling over the roar of the rapids, “Just let go—it’s okay—let go.

The
bends - n. frustration that
you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should, even something you’ve
worked for years to attain, which prompts you to plug in various thought
combinations to try for anything more than static emotional blankness, as if
your heart had been accidentally demagnetized by a surge of expectations.

Apomakrysmenophobia
- n. fear that your connections
with people are ultimately shallow, that although your relationships feel
congenial at the time, an audit of your life would produce an emotional safety
deposit box of low-interest holdings and uninvested windfall profits, which
will indicate you were never really at risk of joy, sacrifice or loss.

Slipcast
- n. the default expression that
your face automatically reverts to when idle—amused, melancholic, pissed
off—which occurs when a strong emotion gets buried and forgotten in the
psychological laundry of everyday life, leaving you wearing an unintentional
vibe of pink or blue or gray, or in rare cases, a tie-dye of sheer madness.

Xeno
- n. the smallest measurable
unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a
flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd
coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful
emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.

Flashover
- n. the moment a conversation
becomes real and alive, which occurs when a spark of trust shorts out the
delicate circuits you keep insulated under layers of irony, momentarily
grounding the static emotional charge you’ve built up through decades of
friction with the world.

Sonder
- n. the realization that each random
passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their
own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story
that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground,
with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know
existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the
background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at
dusk.